On Obscurity

 

§ 672 Cicero (De finibus, 2,15) goes so far as to allow two unblameworthy modes of discourse whose aim is not to be understood. One is when you are deliberately obscure, as Heraclitus was when he discoursed on nature with the utmost obscurity, the other when it is the obscurity of the subject matter in itself rather than the language that makes the discourse obscure, as is the case in Plato’s Timaeus. Here, then, you have two obscure thinkers who are unblameworthy. If you take ‘deliberately obscure’ to mean intentional obscurity κατ᾽αἴσθησιν [i.e., in how he is perceived] lest in his scientific and esoteric considerations he fall into obscurity κατὰ νόησιν [i.e., in how he is understood], and if you hold him to have discoursed thus in his writings on nature, then Heraclitus is unblameworthy: assuredly, he did not discourse in such a way as not to be understood, but rather in such a way as not to be understood by readers who almost entirely bring to bear an analogue of reason in their reading, while declining to exert the power of actual reason.

 

§ 673 If you construe him to be deliberately obscure when, rather than making sure he accommodates an audience that is not yawning but giving him the requisite attention, he pours forth darkness and peddles smoke with a mind set on doing so, and if at least in places he succumbed to this due to his melancholy and his contempt towards his fellow citizens, then Heraclitus is blameworthy. If you interpret obscurity of subject matter as that weakness on the part of most people whereby their minds are unable to comprehend a given thing that is by its nature remote from their sense perceptions, even though not only are others perfectly able to understand the same thing thanks to a more diligent exercise of their mental acuity but also Plato himself clearly and distinctly grasps the matter to be discussed, and if in the Timaeus you therefore deem him to speak of matters utterly dark, then for these reasons he is actually unblameworthy in his obscurity, since he does not discourse in such a way as not to be understood, but in such a way as not to be understood except by those who likewise take pleasure in the mental stimulation of contemplating, now seriously, now in a more relaxed and pleasant way, matters that are by their very nature remote from the senses.

 

§ 674 If you interpret obscurity of subject matter as either the absolute obscurity proper solely to chimaeras, objective dreams, utopian fictions (*) and interpretations thereof, or that of things which from the contemplation of the human race 'the god coneals in murky night' (†) so that we cannot fathom anything of them even by a probable cause from aesthetics, meaning that nobody who would discuss them will either understand them or ever even mentally perceive them in a lucid way, and if you concede that at least in places in the Timaeus Plato sets out to depict things of this kind, or that by some other path he falls into such avoidable obscurity of subject matter, then for this reason he is not unblameworthy in his obscurity, it being baseless to plead obscurity of subject matter as an excuse. For worst of all are ἀδιανόητα, i.e., words that are plain but have a hidden meaning (Quintilian, Institutiones Oratoriae, 8, 2, 20). 

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetics, vol. 2 (1758), 

trans. Alistair Ian Blyth

 

 

§ 672 L. de fin. II. 15. eo usque procedit, ut concedat duobus modis sine reprehensione fieri, si quis ita loquatur, ut non intelligatur. Si aut de industria facias, ut Heraclitus, qui de natura nimis obscure memorauit, aut quum rerum obscuritas, non verborum, facit, ut non intelligatur oratio, qualis est in Timaeo Platonis. Habes duos dogmaticos obscuros sine reprehensione. Si de industria obscurum interpreteris obscurum κατ᾽αἴσθησιν  deliberato consilio, ne per meditationes scientificas et acroamaticas in obscuritatem κατὰ νόησιν incidat: si talem in scriptis suis physicis fuisse Heraclitum statuas: est ille quidem sine reprehensione, verum tunc non ita loquutus est, ut non intelligatur, sed ita, ut non intelligatur a lectoribus solum paene rationis analogon ad lectionem afferentibus, rationis autem nervos intendere recusantibus. 

 

§ 673 Si de industria obscurum interpreteris eum, qui spectatoribus, quales praesertim attendere tenetur, non oscitantibus et merito requisitam attentionem offerentibus, tamen tenebras offundere, fumumque vendere fixum animo habet et propositum: si Heraclitus aliquando saltim, ex atra bile, contemtuque civium, eo lapsus est; non est sine reprehensione. Si rerum obscuritatem interpreteris eam plerorumque hominum infirmitatem, qua datam rem a sensibus suis natura remotiorem ne mente quidem assequuntur, licet eandem tum alii mentis aciem diligentius exercentes pulcre possint intelligere: tum ipse rem eandem tractaturus clare dilucideque perspiciat; si Platonem in Timaeo de rebus hac ratione subobscuris loqui senseris: hanc ob caussam obscurus est ille quidem sine reprehensione, verum nec ita loquutus est, ut non intelligatur, sed ita, ut non intelligatur, nisi ab iis, quibus volupe est aeque mentem acuere, rerum a sensibus per ipsam naturam remotarum contemplatione, nunc severiori, nunc remissa magis atque iucundiore. 

 

§ 674 Si rerum obscuritatem interpreteris vel eam absolutam solis chimaeris, somniis obiectivis, figmentis utopicis ac eorum interpretamentis propriam, vel istarum rerum, quas intuitu generis humani adeo

 

    Caliginosa nocte premit deus,

 

ut earum quicquam ne probabili quidem aestheticis ratione possimus hariolari, ut eas ne tractaturus quidem de iisdem vel intellexerit, vel dilucide saltim animo perceperit unquam: si Platonem in Timaeo, saltim aliquando, res eiusmodi pictum ire concesseris, vel alia via vitabilem rerum obscuritatem incurrere, hanc ob caussam obscurus non est sine reprehensione, nequicquam obscuritate rerum excusatus. Nam pessima sunt ἀδιανόητα, h. e. quae verbis aperta occulto sensu sunt. Quint. VIII. 2.

 

Alexand. Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aestheticorum Pars Altera, 

Frankfurt: Kleyb, 1758

 

 

(*) Baumgarten defines as 'utopian' those primordial mythological fictions that are not grounded in metaphysical truth (veritas metaphysica).

(†) Horace, Carmina, 3, 29, 30.

Dystheoric and aporetic speculations

Ὡς γὰρ οἱ ἐν νοσήμασι χρονίοις πρὸς τὰ κοινὰ βοηθήματα καὶ τὰς συνήθεις διαίτας ἀπειπόντες ἐπὶ καθαρμοὺς καὶ περίαπτα καὶ ὀνείρους τρέπονται, οὕτως ἀναγκαῖον ἐν δυσθεωρήτοις καὶ ἀπόροις σκέψεσιν, ὅταν οἱ κοινοὶ καὶ ἔνδοξοι καὶ συνήθεις λόγοι μὴ πείθωσι, πειρᾶσθαι τῶν ἀτοπωτέρων καὶ μὴ καταφρονεῖν, ἀλλ’ ἐπᾴδειν ἀτεχνῶς ἑαυτοῖς τὰ τῶν παλαιῶν καὶ διὰ πάντων τἀληθὲς ἐξελέγχειν·

 

Plutarch, Moralia 920 b-c

 

Just as those suffering from chronic diseases give up on the common remedies and the customary regimens and turn to purificatory offerings and periapts and dreams, so too in irreducible and insoluble speculations, when the common and generally accepted and customary arguments are unpersuasive, it is necessary to attempt those that are paradoxical and not to disdain them, but artlessly to repeat to ourselves the magic charms (*) of the ancients and to put the truth to the test by every means. 

 

(*) Cf. Plato, Phaedo 114d, where Socrates, after recounting the eschatological myth of the immortal soul's abodes in the next world, says that it is proper and worthy for the man of sense (νοῦν ἔχων ἀνήρ) to venture to believe such things, and even that he should repeat them to himself like magic charms (χρὴ τὰ τοιαῦτα ὥςπερ ἐπᾴδειν ἑαυτῷ)

The dark star

Quare ex particulis hic mundus constat, ac ille


Ex totis, vivis per se, distantibus a se,


Singula nonnulli credunt quoque sidera posse


Dici orbes, terramque appellant sidus opacum,


Cui minimus divum praesit: quia nubibus infra


Imperium teneat, producatque omnia solus,


Corpora, quae aequor habet, tellusque infimus aër:

Umbrarum dominus, simulacraque viva gubernans, 

Cui data sit rerum cura et moderamen earum:

Quae quia non durant, sed tempore corrumpuntur


Exiguo, prope nil possunt, umbraeque vocari.


Hic reor est Pluton, a quo tenebrosa teneri

Regna canunt vates: namque infra nubila nox est,


Supra autem lux clara nitet, splendorque perennis:


Huic igitur, tanquam minimo, Deus ille deorum

Rex genitorque dedit vilissima regna, aliosque


Ut quisque est melior, melioribus addidit astris,


Imperiumque suum natis divisit habendum.

Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus,  Zodiacus vitae (1536), Liber VII

By reason of the fact that this world consists of parts, and that world(*) of wholes, living through themselves, separate from each other, some believe that each star may be said to be a world, and they call the Earth the dark star, over which reigns the least of the gods,(†) for he wields power underneath the clouds, where he alone generates all things, the lord of shadows, governing the living simulacra that are the bodies which exist in sea, on land, and in lower air. To him is given the care and management of these things which, since they do not last, but waste away in a short time, scarcely deserve to be called even shadows. I deem him to be the same Pluto who, so the ancient bards sing, rules the dark kingdom, for underneath the clouds it is night, whereas up above pure light and eternal splendour shine. To him, therefore, as the least of them all, the God of gods, King and Creator, gave the basest realms. The other gods, in order of which was the better, He joined to better stars, dividing the rule of his kingdom among his sons.

* The preceding lines lay out a Platonic hierarchy of Being in descending order, from the higher world of the noumenal to the lower world of the phenomenal, from light to darkness, from indivisible wholes to sundry parts.

† Quoted by Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1.1.2.2): 'The air is not so full of flies in summer as it is at all times of invisible devils: this Paracelsus stiffly maintains, and that they have every one their several chaos; others will have infinite worlds, and each world his peculiar spirits, gods, angels, and devils to govern and punish it. Singula nonnulli credunt . . .  Cui minimus divum praesit.'

Jiří Šalamoun's Tristram Shandy (2)

Here a Devil of a rap at the door snapp’d my father’s definition (like his tobacco-pipe) in two,---and, at the same time, crushed the head of as notable and curious a dissertation as ever was engendered in the womb of speculation.

Vol. II, Chap. VIII

My uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly. 

—Go,---says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzz’d about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,—and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him,---I'll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going a-cross the room, with the fly in his hand,---I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:---Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape,—go poor Devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?----This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.

Vol. II, Chap. XII 

“May he be damn’d in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and purtenance, down to the very stomach. May he be cursed in his reins, and in his groin,” (God in heaven forbid, quoth my uncle Toby)—“in his thighs, in his genitals,” (my father shook his head) “and in his hips, and in his knees, and feet, and toe-nails.”

Vol. III, Chap. XI

He consider’d rather Ernulphus’s anathema, as an institute of swearing, in which, as he suspected, upon the decline of swearing in some milder pontificate, Ernulphus, by order of the succeeding pope, had with great learning and diligence collected together all the laws of it;——fir the same reason that Justinian in the decline of the empire, had ordered his chancellor Tribonian to collect the Roman or civil laws all together into one code or digest,—lest through the rust of time,—and the fatality of all things committed to oral tradition, they should be lost to the world for ever.

Vol. III, Chap. XII

“Good God!” cried my uncle Toby, “are children brought into the world with a squirt?”

Vol. III, Chap. XV

“Nihil me poenitet hujus nasi,” quoth Pamphagus;——“My nose has been the making of me.”—“Nec est cur poeniteat,” replies Cocles; that is, “How the duce should such a nose fail?”

Vol.III, Chap. XXXVII

With all this learning upon Noses running perpetually in my father's fancy—with so many family prejudices—and ten decads of such tales running on for ever along with them—how was it possible with such exquisite—was it a true nose?—

Vol. IV, Chap. I

My father instantly exchanged the attitude he was in, for that in which Socrates is so finely painted by Raffael in his school of Athens; which your connoisseurship knows is so exquisitely imagined, that even the particular manner of the reasoning of Socrates is expressed by it—for he holds the fore-finger of his left-hand between the fore-finger and thumb of his right, and seems as if he was saying to the libertine he is reclaiming—“You grant me this—and this: and this, and this, I don’t ask of you—they follow of themselves in course.”

 Vol. IV, Chap. VII

Though man is of all others the most curious vehicle, said my father, yet at the same time ’tis of so slight frame and so totteringly put together, that the sudden jerks and hard jostlings it unavoidably meets with in this rugged journey, would overset and tear it to pieces a dozen times a day—was it not, brother Toby, that there is a secret spring within us—Which spring, said my uncle Toby, I take to be Religion.

Vol. IV, Chap. VIII

There is something, Sir, in fish-ponds—but what it is, I leave to system builders and fish pond diggers betwixt ’em to find out—but there is something, under the first disorderly transport of the humours, so unaccountably becalming in an orderly and a sober walk towards one of them, that I have often wondered that neither Pythagoras, nor Plato, nor Solon, nor Licurgus, nor Mahomet, nor any of your noted lawgivers, ever gave order about them.

Vol. IV, Chap. XVII

vera sunt illa

Of any private person that ever appeared upon design after his death, there is none did upon a more noble one then that eximious* Platonist Marsilius Ficinus; who having, as Baronius† relates, made a solemn vow with his fellow-Platonist Michael Mercatus (after they had been pretty warmly disputing of the Immortality of the Soul, out of the Principles of their Master Plato) that whether of them two died first should appear to his friend, and give him certain information of that Truth; (it being Ficinus his fate to die first, and indeed not long after this mutual resolution) he was mindful of his promise when he had left the Body. For Michael Mercatus being very intent at his Studies betimes on a morning, heard an horse riding by with all speed, and observed that he stopped at his window; and therewith heard the voice of his friend Ficinus crying out aloud, O Michael, Michael vera, vera sunt illa.‡ Whereupon he suddenly opened the window, and espying Marsilius on a white Steed, called after him; but he vanisht in his sight. He sent therefore presently to Florence to know how Marsilius did; and understood that he died about that hour he called at his window, to assure him of his own and other mens Immortalities.

Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, So farre forth as it is demonstrable from the Knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason. 

London, Printed by J. Flesher, for William Morden, Bookseller in Cambridge. 1659

 

* eximious - excellent, distinguished, eminent; notable, singular (Latin eximius)

† Baronius - Caesar Baronius (1538-1607), Italian cardinal, author of Annales Ecclesiastici (12 vols., 1588-1607)

‡ vera sunt illa - those things are true

a curious involved worming

My hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere above my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851),
Chapter 85, "The Fountain"

On popping one's head up from Hades

In dialogue with Theodorus (Plato, Theaetetus, 168e-171d), Socrates criticises the philosophy of Protagoras ("man is the measure of all things") and concludes with a startling, almost cartoon-like, image, in which he pictures Protagoras popping his head up from Hades to refute his arguments and Theodorus' replies before ducking back down again:

καὶ εἰ αὐτίκα ἐντεῦθεν ἀνακύψειε (1) μέχρι τοῦ αὐχένος (2), πολλὰ (3) ἂν ἐμέ τε ἐλέγξας ληροῦντα, ὡς τὸ εἰκός, καὶ  σὲ ὁμολογοῦντα, καταδὺς (4) ἂν οἴχοιτο ἀποτρέχων (5).

Plato, Theaetetus, 171d

And if he could only just get his head out of the world below, he would have overthrown both of us again and again, me for talking nonsense and you for assenting to me, and have been off and underground in a trice.

trans. Benjamin Jowett

Suppose now he were at this very moment to raise his head and shoulders up from the floor (*), he would very likely scold us roundly, me for talking nonsense and you for assenting to it, and then suddenly disappear and be off before we could stop him.

(*) Like a ghost from the ἀναπίεσμα of a theatre, or a spirit conjured up by necromancy.

trans. F. A. Paley

And if he could at this juncture poke his head up out of the under-world, he might accuse me of many foolish things and upbraid you for falling in with them, and then vanish underground again instanter.

trans. S. W. Dyde

And if he could at once pop up his head where we are, he would not sink down and run away again, until, probably, he had convicted me of talking much nonsense, and you of agreeing to it.

trans. Benjamin Hall Kennedy

And if at this moment he could pop his head up through the ground there as far as to the neck, very probably he would expose me thoroughly for talking such nonsense and you for agreeing to it, before he sank out of sight and took to his heels.  

trans. F. M. Cornford

And if, for example, he should emerge from the ground, here at our feet, if only as far as the neck, he would prove abundantly that I was making a fool of myself by my talk, in all probability, and you by agreeing with me; then he would sink down and be off at a run. 

trans. Harold North Fowler

Notes

(1) ἀνακύπτω: raise the head (the opposite of κύπτω, hang the head). In the Phaedo (109d), Plato employs the image of a denizen of the ocean depths lifting his head (ἀνακύψας) out of the water, in order to convey the human condition of living in the lower air but not being able to lift our heads above the surface of the upper air into the realm of metaphysical reality.
Cf. comical figurative use of the same verb in Aristophanes, Ranae, 1068: περὶ τοὺς ἰχθῦς ἀνέκυψεν "he popped up around the fish markets" and van Leeuwen's note thereon (*): "Verbum ἀνακύπτειν (ut nostrum weder opduiken)" is used "de iis qui inexpectato loco vel tempore conspiciuntur" (The verb ἀνακύπτειν (like the Dutch weder opduiken) is used of those who turn up in an unexpected place or at an unexpected time). Mitchell remarks (†): "Instances of this formula are not much to be expected in the Tragic writers." 

(*) J. van Leeuwen, Aristophanis Ranae cum Prolegomenis et Commentariis, 

Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1896. 

(†) T. Mitchell, The Frogs of Aristophanes with Notes Critical and Explanatory,

London: John Murray, Albemarle-Street, 1839, p. 235.

(2) μέχρι τοῦ αὐχένος: as far as or up to the neck or throat.

(3) Jowett, Paley, Cornford and Fowler read πολλὰ as modifying ἐλέγξας, Dyde and Kennedy as modifying ἐμέ ληροῦντα.

(4) καταδύω: go down, sink, set. Found in Homer particularly with reference to the sun: ἠέλιον κατέδυ "the sun sank", but also used of making the descent into Hades: καταδυσόμεθ' εἰς Ἀΐδαο δόμους "we shall do down into the halls of Hades" (Odyssey 10, 174). In De facie quae in orbe lunae apparet (943d), Plutarch describes not fully purged souls as reaching the Moon, the realm of Persephone, only to be repelled, as if sinking back down into the deep (εἰς βυθὸν αὖθις καταδυομένας). 

(5) ἀποτρέχω: run off or away. When referring to men, the meaning of τρέχω is "run", but when used of things it simply means "move quickly". Fowler ("be off at a run"), Cornford ("took to his heels") and Kennedy ("run away again") inappropriately apply the notion of running to the head of a shade which simply sinks down and swiftly vanishes: καταδὺς ἂν οἴχοιτο ἀποτρέχων, literally "having sunk down would depart moving off quickly". 

Plutonis Regia

Socrates. On this account, Hermogenes, let us say, that not one of those there is willing to come hither, not even the Syrens themselves; but that both they, and all others, are enchanted; such beautiful discourses does Pluto, it seems, know how to utter. And by this reasoning this god is both a perfect sophist, and a great benefactor to those with him; and who sends up to those here such good things; so many things does he have in superfluity; and from hence he has the name of Pluto. And on the other hand, through his unwillingness to associate with men invested with bodies, but only to have an intercourse with them, when the soul becomes cleansed from all the evils and desires which were around the body, does he not appear to you to be a philosopher, and to have well considered this, that he should thus detain them, by binding them with the desire for virture; but that if they possessed the flutterings and mad feelings of the body, not even his father Kronos would be able to detain them with him, in those bonds with which he was said to be bound.

Plato, Cratylus, 403d-404a

George Burges, The Works of Plato. A New and Literal Version, London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, 1850. Vol. 3, pp. 320-321

Form and mere matter

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times over. Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the form is new. But then, in the creation of philosophical literature, as in all other products of art, form, in the full signification of that word, is everything, and the mere matter is nothing.

Walter Pater, Fellow of Brasenose College, Plato and Platonism. A Series of Lectures, Second Edition, 1895, Macmillan and Co., Limited, London, 1902, p. 8

1:1

1:1 at the Romanian Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2010. Installation created by Romina Grillo, Ciprian Rășoiu, Liviu Vasiu, Matei Vlăsceanu and Tudor Vlăsceanu
Image: Dezeen Design Magazine, 3 September 2010

De Nihilo

When confronted with an empty space, we might ask ourselves what exactly it is that is not there. Something is not there, which is to say, nothing is there. As Henry Fielding puts it in his “An Essay upon Nothing” (1743), “as Nothing is not Something, so every thing which is not Something, is Nothing; and wherever Something is not, Nothing is.” But the statement “Nothing is there” ineluctably leads to a logical dead-end, an aporia: for, if nothing “is”—if “nothing” has being—then it is no longer “nothing” but rather “something”.

The paradoxes of “nothing” and “not-being” are as old as philosophy itself. They are a subversive discourse against which philosophy is helpless to legislate or defend itself. For, as soon as speculative thought postulates “being”, it is a dialectical inevitability that “not-being” will then stake its paradoxical claim to existence. In Plato’s dialogue the Sophist, the anonymous Eleatic Stranger, thus himself a nemo or nobody, a species of nullus and ultimately nihil, warns Theaetetus to turn from the way that leads to thinking not-being is, before himself becoming lost in a maze of reasoning about the possibility of false statements. In Greek, false statements are those that “say what is not” (similarly, Swift’s ultra-rational Houyhnhnms have no notion of falsehood, and Gulliver is only able to explain it to them as “the thing which is not”). But if a statement says nothing, if it predicates what is not, then it is no longer a statement, an adfirmatio, and so there can be no false statements. Another aporia.

Whereas the Greeks laboured under a horror vacui, imagining that primitive matter must somehow have always existed before it was moulded into the cosmos by a divine demiurge, for the scholastics God’s creatio ex nihilo conferred upon “nothing” the privileged status of a primordial “something”. For example, in the Epistola de Nihilo et Tenebris (Letter on Nothing and Shadows) by ninth-century English monk Fredegisus (also known as Fridugisus, Fredugisus, Fridigisus, Fridogisus, Fridegisus, Fridugusus, Frudigisus etc.), the answer to the question “nihilne aliquid sit, an non” (whether nothing is something or not) is found to be affirmative. Among the series of logical arguments he provides is the following: “Omnis significatio est quod est. Nihil autem aliquid significat. Igitur nihil ejus significatio est quid est, id est, rei existentis” (Every signification is what it is. But ‘nothing’ signifies something. Therefore the signification of ‘nothing’ is what it is, that is, [the signification] of an existing thing) (Migne, Patrologia Latina, 105: 752-3). Moreover, given that according to the sacred mysteries God created earth, air, water, fire, light, the angels and man’s soul “out of nothing”, nothing is not only something, but also a great and particular something (magnum quiddam).

Having been elevated to this primordial God-given dignity, nihil goes on to be the subject of several mediaeval (parodic) sermons. Later, with the revival of the spoudogeloion/joco-serium tradition in the Renaissance, it becomes the subject of countless epideictic encomia, which paradoxically demonstrate its pre-eminence. The most important of all these, and the source of countless imitations, was the Laudatio Nihili of Johannes Passeratius (1534-1602), where we find that Nothing is more precious than gold and gems (“Nam Nihil est gemmis, Nihil est pretiosius auro”), Nothing is more beautiful than a watered garden (“Nihil irriguo formosius horto”), Nothing is loftier than the stars (“Nihil altius astris”), Nothing is more useful to the human race than the art of healing (“Humano generi utilius Nihil arte medendi”), and so on. When Passeratius goes so far as to say that Nothing is ultimately greater than Jove (“Nihil est Jove denique maius”), praise verges upon blasphemy, however. Such daringly blasphemous paradoxical permutations are also on display in a tractate called De Nihili Antiquitate (included in the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Socraticae Joco-Seriae (1619) of Caspar Dornavius), composed by P. Aemilius Portus (1550-1614/15), where we find that Nothing is more ancient than Eternal God Himself, because Nothing was created before God (“Aeterno Deo Nihil antiquius [est]. Quia Nihil creatum est ante Deo”). Ultimately, however, the nihil paradox can always be rescued from blasphemy by its amphiboly: if nihil is read as a pronoun rather than as a noun, as a significatio, as Fredegisus would have it, then the statement that nothing is greater than God becomes the definition of orthodoxy itself.

In 1608, thus at around the same time as the De Nihili Antiquitate, a certain Cornelius Götz delivered a discourse on Nothing before a learned assembly in Wittenberg, presided over by Rudolf Goclenius senior (the great humanist philosopher and inventor of the terms “ontology” and “psychology”). Published in Marburg, the full title of the work is Disputatio de Nihilo, quae non est de Nihilo, Vagans per omnes disciplinas (Disputation on Nothing, which is not about Nothing, Ranging through all the Disciplines). The treatise explores the Greek and Latin etymologies of nothing, the definition of nothing (Modus sine re, cuius est modus, a quo pendet essentialiter, est nihil, id est, esse non potest—The mode without reality, from whose mode it is that it essentially hangs, is nothing, that is, it is not able to be), the species of nothing (nihil absolute and nihil negativum or non ens per se), the theological significations of nothing (for St Paul, an idol is nothing (Idolum nihil est), devoid of any numinous power, while for St Basil, man is nothing by reason of his matter and great by reason of his dignity (homo nihil est propter materiam et magnus propter honorem)), the physics of nothing (nothing can be made from nothing—Ex nihilo nihil fit, after Aristotle), God’s creation out of nothing (Creatio est constitutio essentiae ex nihilo—the creation is the establishment of being out of nothing), evil as a privation of being and thus nothing, the differences between annihilation (recidere seu transire in nihil—to fall back or pass over into nothing), corruption, dissolution and transubstantiation, and much more. To the forty-six propositions of the disputatio proper are appended a number of miscellaneous metaphysical, theological, physical, logical, rhetorical and grammatical questions and answers. Under the heading of Logic, for example, Götz puts forward the following conundrum: “Principium materiale mundi est non nihil: Enunciatum affirmatum falsum est. Principium materiale mundi non est nihil. Enunciatum negatum verum est” (The material origin of the world is non-nothing. The proposition is false when asserted positively. The material origin of the world is not nothing. The proposition is true when asserted negatively).

The jesting-serious wisdom of the Renaissance, which can turn even such a seemingly sterile subject as Nothing into a dazzling rhetorical display of wit and learning, will later give way to metaphysical and existential angst, to fear of the néant. In Heidegger’s Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935, published 1953), the question posed by Leibniz—“Why is there something rather than nothing?”—becomes the inevitable Grundfrage, which looms equally in moments of despair, joy or boredom: “Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts” (Why are there beings-that-are and not nothing?). For Heidegger, however, the second part of the question is redundant. Even to speak of “nothing” is a grave offence against the logos, against logic, a reckless act that undermines all culture and thought, allying itself with nothingness in the destructive will to nihilism. Therefore, he erases it, consigning the question about nothing to nothingness, and asks simply, “Why are there beings-that-are?” In Was ist Metaphysik, Heidegger tries to find a way around the angst-inducing implications of using “nothing” and “is” in the same sentence, and comes up with “Das Nichts selbst nichtet” (The nothing nothings itself). Rudolph Carnap famously cited this as an example of metaphysical nonsense, but Henry Fielding perhaps best described the nature of this kind of discourse two centuries earlier in his “An Essay Upon Nothing”: “When a Bladder is full of Wind, it is full of Something; but when that is let out, we aptly say, there is Nothing in it. The same may be as justly asserted of a Man as of a Bladder. (…) It is at least possible for a Man to know Nothing. And whoever hath read over many Works of our ingenious Moderns, with proper Attention and Emolument, will, I believe, confess, that if he understands them right, he understands Nothing.”

However, the very word “nothing” does undeniably incorporate an existential premise. No-thing is the non-existence of a thing, after all. Nihil can only be defined by reference to aliquid, a something (else). In etymological terms, this existential premise would seem to be linguistically universal. But what it is that nothing is not varies according to different languages. In Greek, “nothing” is ouden, literally “not-one” (ne unum quidem), or, in the language of philosophy, to mê on, “not-being” (non ens). In Latin, nihil derives from hilum, “a tiny thing”, “a thing of no importance”, “a trifle”. The Russian nichto is a “not-what”. To take a very interesting non-Indo-European example, in Georgian (Kartveli) “nothing” is araperi, literally “not-colour” (ne color quidem). In the phenomenal world, every thing has a colour and it is impossible to imagine any thing without a colour. Even transparent things—water, air, glass etc.—reflect the colours of other things.(*) They exist in space against a background of colour, and it is impossible to picture them mentally in a vacuum, in their pure colourless transparency. Any empty space is thus imbued with borrowed colours. Only an unimaginable metaphysical non-space, a ne locus quidem outside space and being, would truly be devoid of any colour, be it even only black. Only the non-space of non-colour would truly be nothing.

Finally, the etymon of the Romanian nimic (“nothing”) is nemica, from the Latin ne mica (not a crumb, not a morsel). It thus echoes the Latin ne hilum. The Romanian verb a nimicnici (“to annihilate”), and its variant a nimici, might be translated as “to reduce something to less than its ultimate crumb of matter”. The mica, which refers to the smallest possible particle of matter (cf. the hilum, which can also refer to the moral unimportance of a thing; Lucretius uses ne hilum in the sense of “not a whit”, “not a jot” and hilum in the sense of “smallest part (of a thing)”), is thus the final threshold between “something” and “nothing”. In contrast to the German das Nichts, which is perhaps the starkest nothing of all—a naked “not”— the Romanian nimicul (the nothing, nothingness, not-a-crumb-ness) is peculiarly substantial; it incorporates within itself the trace or echo of a physical something, a tiny crumb which is no longer there or could never be there. Likewise, the empty space that is intrinsic to the 1:1 installation in the Romanian Pavilion at this year’s Biennale of Architecture in Venice is a means of articulating within space nimic, nihil, nichego, araperi, nothing, as a way of asking what is no longer there, what could have been there, what should be there.

Alistair Ian Blyth, from the exhibition catalogue

Image: Dezeen

(*) The Georgian araperi may be compared with the Romanian idiomatic expression de nici o culoare ("not at all", "in no way", "by no means"), which translates literally as "by not one colour". 

An Tartarus sit aliquid, utrum vero nihil?

Q. An Tartarus sit aliquid, utrum vero nihil?

R. Est aliquid nempe locus cruciatus Luc. 6 [sic.]. Est nihil de quo Plato in Phaedone. Sic ᾅδης est aliquid; ut cum dicitur, descendit ἐις ᾅδην. Est etiam nihil: ut fingitur esse domus Plutonis. Plasmata enim rationis, quae Aristot. opponit πράγμασιν, referimus ad nihil.

Rodolphus Goclenius, Disputatio de nihilo, quae non est de nihilo,
vagans per omnes disciplinas

Q. Whether Tartarus is something or in fact nothing

A. The place of torment is surely something (Luke [16.23]). It is the nothing about which Plato [tells] in the Phaedo. Thus ᾅδης [Hades] is something; as when it is said, he descended ἐις ᾅδην [into Hades]. It is also nothing: as it is imagined to be the house of Pluto. For, the fictions of reasoning, which Aristotle opposed πράγμασιν [to concrete realities], we ascribe to nothing.

The Seductiveness of the Metaxy

The Interval is the metaphysical space between the eternal world of Forms and the perishable world of perceptible things, between the noumenal and the phenomenal, between the immanent and the transcendent, between Being and becoming. It is the mystical medium which enables communication between the higher and the lower regions of the spirit. It is the eschatological liminal space between heaven and hell. It is the neutral, morally ambivalent intermediate zone between good and evil.

When we speak of the metaphysics of the Interval we are, however, using a term whose primary meaning could not be more mundanely material. For, the interval is a dead metaphor that originates in the earthworks of Roman military architecture. The intervallum was literally that which lay between two lines of stakes (a vallum, or palisaded entrenchment); it was the space between the ramparts of a legionary camp. In Greek, however, “the interval” is abstract from the outset, referring to spatial or temporal relation rather than to any definite physical space. It is τὸ μεταξύ, the metaxy, a substantival use of the compound adverb/preposition μεταξύ (“in the midst of”, from μετά “between” and ξύν “together with”), used of place (“between”) and time (“between-whiles,” “meanwhile”). In grammar, τὸ μεταξύ is the name for the neuter gender, the class of declensions that are neither masculine nor feminine. Derived from μεταξύ, the noun metaxytês (ἡ μεταξύτης) is another term for the diastema (τὸ διάστημα – “space between”), or interval in music. In the sixth century A.D., the Greek philosophical scholiasts of the late Roman period, for example Olympiodorus Philosophus, who wrote commentaries on Plato and Aristotle, coined the term metaxylogia (μεταξυλογία) to refer to a digression, an intermediate passage within a text, a temporary lapse from the main subject. The text that follows might therefore also be named a metaxylogy, in the sense that it is a digression in between texts arising from the “Seductiveness of the Interval” exhibition installed within the space of the Romanian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Art Biennale, but also in the sense that it is a discourse, a logos concerning the Interval, or metaxy.

In the singular, τὸ μεταξύ does not occur as such in the extant works of Plato, although Aristotle (Metaphysics, 987b) reports that his teacher admitted an “in-between” (μεταξύ) class of things, in the interval between things perceptible to the senses (τὰ αἰσθητά) and the Forms, or Ideas (τὰ εἴδη), knowable by the mind; these are the objects of mathematics, eternal and immutable like the Forms, but unlike them multiple. The interval is therefore necessarily a space of multiplicity, participating in both the immutability of the eternal and the plurality of the temporal. Indeed, it is as a neuter plural (τὰ μεταξύ), referring to “intermediate” or “in-between things”, that the metaxy occurs in Plato’s Gorgias (468a), where Socrates discovers through dialogue with Polus that there is a neutral class of things, qualities, states and actions which are neither good nor bad (τὰ μήτε ἀγαθὰ μήτε κακά). While our actions may in themselves be neutral or intermediate (Socrates gives the examples of sitting, walking, and running), we always act in pursuit of the good, however. Even evil actions are committed for the sake of the good; they are evil as a result of their agents’ perverted understanding, whereby the Good and the Truth become obnubilated in the soul. Similarly, in the Neoplatonist philosophy of Plotinus, the metaxy occurs with the masculine plural definite article: men are οἱ μεταξύ (“the in-between ones”), in the middle place between gods and beasts (Enneads, III, 8, 10-11). Just as the earth lies in the middle point of the heavens, so man is suspended between god and beast, matter and spirit, time and eternity, corruption and perfection. This position is not, however, one of inertia, but rather one of continual tension: caught between the lower and upper strata of the cosmic order, man alternately inclines towards both (ῥέπει ἐπ᾽ ἄμφω).

Whereas for Plotinus man is the interval, the middle term between lower and higher, between beasts and gods, with a shift of metaphysical perspective man himself might become the lower term, with a further interval opening up between him and the gods. Likewise, the earth, instead of being the middle point, might equally be seen as the lowest point on a vertical scale at whose pinnacle are situated the heavens. In a dialogue entitled On the Obsolescence of the Oracles, by Platonist philosopher Plutarch, we learn (the speaker at this point in the text is Cleombrotus) that there is an interval between earth and moon (μεταξὺ γῆς καὶ σελήνης). Far from being void, this interval is filled with air (ἀήρ, “(lower) air”, as opposed to αἰθήρ, the “upper air”, “aether”, or “heaven”), which, were it removed, would destroy the consociation (κοινωνία) of the universe. The lower air is also the abode of the intermediate race of daimons (δαιμόνων γένος), whose function is interpretative, hermeneutic, and without whom man would either be severed from the gods altogether or subject to the confusion of unmediated contact with them (De defectu oraculorum, 416e-f). According to Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (De somniis, I, 141), on the other hand, the daimons of the philosophers are, in fact, the “angels” of “the divine word” (ὁ ἱερὸς λόγος) of Hebrew scripture, intermediaries of the Interval, who convey back and forth (διαγγέλλουσι) the exhortations of the Father to His children and the wants of the children to the Father.
The plastic image of this traffic or commerce between the world above and that below, which occurs within the ambi-directional space of the Interval, is, of course, the ladder. Philo of Alexandria, in his commentary on Jacob’s vision of the ladder (Genesis, 28:12), says that κλῖμαξ (“ladder”) is a figurative name for ἀήρ, whose base (βάσις) is the earth and whose top (κορυφή) is heaven (De somniis, I, 134). Furthermore, just as the universe is, figuratively, a ladder, or interval, so too is the soul. Here, the foot of the ladder is sense perception, corresponding to the earthly element, while the top is the mind, the nous (νοῦς), corresponding to the heavenly element (De somniis, I, 146). Like the angels, the words of God move up and down the entire length of this ladder, reaching down through the interval to draw the mortal mind upward.
The mind’s ascent of the ladder is an arduous undertaking, an exertion of the soul that Philo names ascesis (ἄσκησις, “exercise, training, practice”). The ascent is not continuous, but rather oscillates, with the practiser/ascetic alternately gaining and losing height, now wakeful, now asleep, pulled in opposite directions by the better and the worse (De somniis, I, 150-152). The practisers thus dwell in the interval; they are “midway between extremes” (μεθόριοι τῶν ἄκρων). At the topmost extreme dwell the wise, who have always striven for the heights, and at the bottommost extreme dwell the wicked, who have ever made dying and corruption their practice.
Man’s condition as one of “those-in-between,” pulled between good and evil, inclining now toward base perdition, now toward the transcendent, is conditional upon his existence within time, within becoming. For those in Hades or Olympus, in hell or heaven, which exist outside of time, further change is impossible, however. Yet even at this eschatological level there is an interval, an intermediate state that is neither good nor evil, wisdom nor wickedness, hell nor heaven, angel nor devil. According to a mediaeval popular tradition, traces of which can also be found in the legend of the Voyage of St Brendan, there was a third, neutral faction of angels during the revolt in Heaven, who were neither for God nor His enemy, Lucifer. These angels were cast out of Heaven, but rejected by Hell. Instead, they dwell in the interval between the two eschatological planes, an indeterminate zone that is neither good nor evil. In the Divina Commedia of Dante, they are to be found in the vestibule or threshold of Hell, among those who are neither dead nor alive, “the sect of caitiffs, hateful to God and to His enemies” (“la setta dei cattivi, / a Dio spiacenti ed a’ nemici sui” – Inferno, 3, 62-63).

The interval as threshold is also the locus of a peculiar, intermediate genre of literature, the σπουδογέλοιον or joco-serium (“serious-jesting” or “jesting-serious” – серьезно-смеховой), whose history is traced by Mikhail Bakhtin in Chapter Four of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. The genre springs from the tradition of the Socratic dialogue, of which, apart from Xenophon, Plato is the only extant exponent. In itself a discursive form of the interval, a polyphonic intermediation whereby latent truth and knowledge are brought to birth by the participating speakers, or “ideologues”, as Bakhtin names them, the σπουδογέλοιον is an eschatological “dialogue on the threshold” (Schwellendialog, or диалог на пороге, in Russian) that takes place in the interval between earth and underworld or between earth and heaven. One of the most famous classical examples is Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (Pumpkinification), a parodic apotheosis, in which the Emperor Claudius, having given up the ghost via the back passage, is turned away from the gates of Olympus.

Menippus, Diego Velázquez

The chief protagonist of the serious-jesting eschatological dialogue on the threshold is, however, Menippus of Gadara, a third-century B.C. Cynic philosopher of Phoenician origin, who is said to have been the originator of this literary genre, known also as “Menippean Satire,” although none of his writings are extant. (In Lives of Eminent Philosophers (6, 101), Diogenes Laertius reports that Menippus composed, among other writings, a Νέκυια, or Journey to the Underworld.) Menippus, as satirical ideologue of the Interval, is the central character in a number of dialogues by Lucian of Samosata, all of which take place on the threshold between worlds: for example, the Icaromenippus, in which the Cynic fashions himself wings and flies to heaven to discover the (less than flattering) truth about the gods; and the Necyia, possibly inspired by the lost writings of the Gadarene, in which he descends to Hades to mock at the miserable fate of kings and millionaires in the afterlife.
The σπουδογέλοιον continues as a distinct, recognisable genre until as late as the seventeenth century, a fine example being the monumental anthology Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Socraticae Joco-Seriae (Amphitheatre of Jesting-Serious Socratic Wisdom), published by Caspar Dornavius in 1619. The Amphitheatrum contains liminal, intermediate texts, ambiguously situated between high and low, which treat derisory subjects in a grandiloquent way, or which are simultaneously scholastic and absurd, such as the Disquisitio Physiologica de Pilis (Physiological Disquisition on Hair) by Joannes Tardinus, which painstakingly exhausts all the philosophical, theological, historical, geographical, medical and scientific possibilities of the subject, or the De Peditu eiusque Speciebus, Crepitu et Visio, Discursus Methodicus, In Theses digestus (On Farting and its Species, the Loud and the Silent, Methodical Discourse, Arranged in Theses), by the pseudonymous Buldrianus Sclopetarius, a mock philological, historical, scientific and even musicological tract whose title speaks for itself.

In conclusion, as a space of tension between two static extremes, it is only the existence of the metaxy that enables the possibility of ambi-directional movement, thereby creating a medium of communication. The metaxy can also be ambivalent – Bakhtin would say “carnivalesque” – abolishing and merging hierarchical opposites. And hence the seductiveness of the metaxylogical.

(c) Alistair Ian Blyth, Bucharest, 2009
Published in The Seductiveness of the Interval. Romanian Pavilion - 53rd International Art Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia 7th June-22nd November 2009 by the Romanian Cultural Institute of Stockholm